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I'll check my mother's VIAO the next time she brings it home and report back on my Slashdot Journal.

A 1.5 to 2 year old Sony VIAO laptop does not appear to have the rootkit pre-installed. It might have other Sony junk on it, but I think it's relatively clear of their insane IP-protection black-hat junk.

Have a quick look at the "RecentChanges" of the unofficial Flickr Wiki. Go ahead, I'll wait.

...

You'll notice a huge number of changes on, as it happens my birthday, the 4th of September by "146.219.19.22". It's all spam. Spend even a couple of days working with Wikinews and you'll learn of "Ass Puss" -- a tedious, repetitious form of vandalism.

There's probably a law, like Murphy's, that says that in any sufficiently large population there are more people interested in destroying the work of others for profit or kicks than there are interested in taking the time needed to create something new. If that isn't an existing law, can someone clean it up and call it the "Krisjohn/Insert your name here" law?

Smith Micro Software have just announced their acquisition Of Allume (press release), makers of the long running Stuffit compression software, most noticable for their recent, lossless, JPEG-recompression technique. The new owners have already announced the expansion of this technique to new file formats; "... for other media file types such as MPEG movies and MP3 audio files." and to the wireless world. I look forward to being able to pack JPEGs from my old digital camera, using my PocketPC, before emailing them through my incredibly expensive GPRS service.

I guess it's a couple of things. For ages now, whenever I've received moderation points I've had a seriously hard time finding anywhere to spend them. This means that of the discussions I'm not moved to comment in, I don't care enough to even moderate. I don't comment in many discussions and many of those have limited, or highly conservative (or seriously uninformed) interest from other members.

I really thought that people would be interested in the Google Web Accelerator, not have responses between indifference and paranoia. Are we all really so jaded that we assume everything is an attempt at corporate takeover? (Ask yourself, if you produced an innovate product, how would you sell it to people? Would you use a company?) I'm tempted to give The Well a go...

I use a web filter. I've now met two fairly high-profile websites that have stupid errors in the page (faulty javascript and badly written forms) where I have to create a new rule for my web filter to process (hack) the web pages so that they work as intended. Anyone else finding this?

I believe that the current preferred financial term is "adjustment", or possibly "correction", but the house of cards I lovingly (and laughingly) refer to as my social life looks about due for a major collapse.

Life's good, don't get me wrong, it's just that some speculative investments aren't paying off and it's time to decide if I cut my losses.

The major disappointment is the West Australian Greens party. From the inside it looks like it's falling apart. That's not to say that elected representatives won't do a good job, but just that the adminstrative structure is ready to implode. Basically it's run like a charity, not a political party.

More generally, I have a bunch of creative things I want to do -- stuff I've always enjoyed -- but I haven't been able to find time for them given the amount of pre-packaged entertainment I consume. World of Warcraft plus a Netflix-like service plus a two-foot pile of books do not leave any time for anything else.

So, the Bigpond Movies trial has been fun, but I won't be buying the service. My World of Warcraft subscription ends a few days into next month and I'll be taking at least a two and a half week break. The Greens can go do their own thing, I'm not interested in giving any more time or money when they're just going to waste it. Add in six strategic annual leave days I'm cashing in over the next six weeks and I might just catch up with all the things I've been neglecting by the end of next month.

It was fairly obvious when the book pile started to grow out of hand, but I still found time to just slob about and watch TV. No longer! It's all go-go-go, even when it comes to entertainment. "Bigpond Movies" (the Netflix-like service) was the last straw. I've now got a pile of DVDs to watch like I have my pile of books, on top of everything else trying to consume my time.

I bought a new PC a number of weeks back but have only been using it intermittently. Mainly that's because the 3D is unstable. Bleeding edge. Leaked beta drivers, et al. But now that the latest World of Warcraft patch allows me to turn on full screen anti-aliasing (and the polygon glitches appear to have gone away), buggered if I'm playing it on any of my other PCs. Now I just need my WoW Zboard and Razor mice.

I've dumped my Blogger journal, but I can't completely shake the need to post crap. I setup some sort of linking thing that causes posts here to go onto Blogger and then onto Livejournal. I can't remember the account I used, so I'm just going to see if this does anything.

I finished Babylon 5 season five late last week. Quite enjoyable, though the last episode was pretty pointless. Now I've just got a few movies if I want to check them out.

I've got six more Gmail invites. If you're interested and you don't already have a Gmail account find my email address on my homepage and send me a message. I'll post replies as the invites are used up.